Blog/2024-11-27/LA Koreatown
We're in Hollywood, Los Angeles for Thanksgiving with my cousin and decided to go to Koreatown for lunch since there isn't anything like this up in San Francisco.
We walked about a little and ended up at this place Jun Won Dak, which turned out to be a small 4-person version of a bigger restaurant called Jun Won that had to close due to pandemic restrictions preventing patrons from visiting.
It's interesting how certain kinds of scale increase fragility. Running a big restaurant happens to be one of these since you've got your rent to handle, your employees, and the variety you offer is now pure liability since your ingredient list is large. In any case, like every endeavour that grows successful and big, the proprietor and his mum seem to enjoy much more this smaller store with it's fixed menu of four options.
Koreatown[edit]
Talking to him about LA, it's funny to realize that some of the nation-defining moments that the US has had were part of the lives of folks like him. In his case, it was the 1992 LA riots. I know in the abstract that many Koreans took to their rooftops with firearms to protect their shops and homes. But the reality of people's experience is quite something when described.
Imagine your friend getting a call to defend the family's shop and you go there holding bats and stand in front of the store only to see pickup trucks in the distance with people in the back yelling; and then hiding in the store to see a large group of people armed with handguns and bats go by. When I recall my eleventh standard high-school experience it had no shade of this kind of threat. What a turbulent nation!
One particularly sad story he told us is about how Korean radio would broadcast information about places that needed help to be defended. One of the big scandals in the community is that one of the people whose store was under threat mistook reinforcements for imminent attack and killed a friend in friendly fire. What a way to go. But when trained soldiers end up doing this, I suppose it can't be helped that this sort of thing happens.
Minority Report[edit]
One of the things that most amuses me about my wife is the way she surprises me with opinions I could never have guessed she could have had. In this case, we were talking about the future and how our kids are going to drive us crazy by acting like the people of their time rather than the people of our time.
That led to talk of the future and we had a conversation which I could not continue after she said she was eager to see the future of Minority Report, the exciting part not being the precognition but the fact that all the ads are personalized to you and shown through your retinal implant or something. Outrageous stuff.
